The Skeleton Cupboard (19 page)

“I am sorry you had to tell me,
mein Liebling
. I am so sorry that you have found this difficult.” He patted my hand and I hope didn't notice me wiping away a tear. “There is one thing more you can do for me, though.”

I looked up. “What is it, Harold? Anything you want I'll help you with.”

“I want to tell you my whole story—
meine Geschichte
—so that you can tell others
wer ich wirklich bin.
”

Harold wanted me to tell others who he really was, so I listened and wrote it all down in a notebook.

After being separated from his family and put into a concentration-camp factory, Harold one day saw his emaciated brother standing behind the barbed wire that separated the camp from his place of work.

“I threw him my watch,” Harold told me.

I was confused. “Why was your brother not with you in the camp factory?”

“He was ill before we got there. He had poor lungs and was physically weak. Our father was shot in front of him and from that point I think he stopped caring.
Er hatte keinen Willen mehr
.”

Harold's brother gave up the will to live. Again I felt tears prick my eyes.

“Your mother, your sister?”

“They were sent to another camp and we never saw them again.”

And so Harold's story began with a watch—a precious watch given to him by his brother on the occasion of his bar mitzvah. This watch represented everything to Harold: becoming a man, his brother's love, being part of his family, his culture, his religion.

“I kept that watch hidden from them for a long time. They took everything from us—our clothes, our possessions—but I would never let them find my watch. There were times, you know, when my watch could have got me a better meal or stopped a beating, but to give them my watch would have been to give them my life.”

From the window of the camp factory, Harold saw his brother standing behind the barbed wire; his brother saw him.

“It was an instinct for me to throw the watch at him. And so that I did.”

I waited, pen poised.

“It fell to the ground in front of the wire.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then I went back to work in the factory.”

“And your brother, Harold?”

“I never saw my brother again.”

Then Harold had to do awful things.

He built bridges for his kinsmen to walk over to their deaths into the gas chambers. He sorted cadavers into piles of those with normal teeth and those who had gold fillings, which he was required to extract.

Finally he was sent on a march with feet bleeding from ill-fitting wooden clogs.

Harold told me, “I saw those others die as they fell on the road and I just marched on.”

One day, weak from hunger, he found himself in a wood next to a graveyard.

“I stood against the wall. The women were screaming and their children wailing. Men were praying.”

Telling me this, he began to rock gently and softly chant.

I knew those words. The Kaddish: the Jewish prayer for the dead. My father had spoken it at his mother's funeral.

Among the terror and the wailing and the prayers for the dead, Harold at twenty-three years old and half dead from hunger and fatigue, somehow found the immense strength to jump over the high churchyard wall and into the cemetery behind.

“I heard gunfire. There were screams. I will never forgive myself for leaving them, but I hid behind a gravestone. Later an SS guard pissed near where I was hiding and I wanted to kill him, but I couldn't.”

“Mein Liebling, ich bete zu Gott, dass Du nie dasselbe erlebst
.
”

Harold asked God that the same would never happen to me. I loved him for that, but I knew then, and I know now, that all over our world the same barbaric shit still goes on.

It took me many weeks, a few days here and there at a time between working with other residents in the home, to chronicle Harold's stories as he had asked me to. Some of it was horrific, but similar in a way to what I had already heard from my grandmother and other relatives and, in a more sanitized version, from history lessons at school. But there were moments when I couldn't believe what Harold was saying. Reading about it is one thing; hearing it spoken by a man who has lived it is quite vividly different.

“Toward the end, when I was recaptured and put back into the camp, I became very ill. I had dysentery; I was malnourished, my body broken and covered in sores.
Sie haben mir den Geist gebrochen:
They broke my spirit. Then I gave up and I went to die in the infirmary, where I lay between two others waiting to die.”

Harold took a sip of coffee. “You make this very well,
Schatz
.”

“My grandmother taught me. She was born in Hamburg.”

And she also called me “sweetheart.”

“Tell me about her while I drink.”

“Well, she was an eccentric woman—an actress and a model; she was a cabaret dancer in Berlin before the war, before she met my
Opa
. They were Jewish and left Germany in 1937 when she was pregnant with my father.
Opa
had already been married and his first wife wasn't a Jew; she denounced them to the Nazis.”

Harold continued to drink and listen. “Were any of your family in the camps?”

“Yes, many. I know about Dachau and Buchenwald.”

Harold shook his head. “So what you hear from me you already know.”

“Actually, not really. Those who survived never spoke much about it.” I refilled the coffee cups. “They said nothing, but many struggled with depression.”

We raised our cups to each other.

“Anyway, this is your story, Harold, no one else's.”

Then I had a thought. “Children, Harold? Why didn't you and Sarai have children?”

Harold put his cup down slowly. “
Leider keine Kinder.
There were some experiments done in some of the camps and my Sarai was made to be unable to have children.”

Christ, could it get any worse? I am ashamed to say I let that information drop without acknowledgment.

“Is your grandmother still alive?”

“No, Harold. She was murdered eight years ago.”

He patted my hand. “So you too know of the senseless butchery of one you love.”

I couldn't go there. I couldn't let this man become responsible for helping me through my still unprocessed grief.

“How did you survive the infirmary?”

“Ach, I have no idea. My bedfellows would die on either side of me and they would pull them off by their feet and drag them to join the pile of rotting bodies outside the infirmary window. As they dragged them, their heads bounced off the floor. This is a noise I will never forget.”

I grimaced, feeling sick.

Harold sensed my disgust. “
Entschuldigung, Liebling
. Enough. Let's get to the end because we are now nearly done. So, the Americans came one day. They rounded up the Nazis, but there were some that were killed, some torn apart by those with enough strength to do so.” Harold paused and wiped his mouth. “Some became savages like them.”

“But that's understandable, surely, Harold?”

“Inhumanity is inhumanity whichever way you look at it. Somewhere it has to stop.”

I struggled with this. If I'd seen my parents, my sister, tortured, starved, killed in front of me and if I'd made it through to get revenge, wouldn't I do it and feel justified doing so?

As if reading my thoughts, Harold asked, “Would you kill your grandmother's murderer?”

I was shocked. I'd honestly never thought about it.

“I don't know.” I thought again. “I think if I had had the chance, at the time, when everything was so raw, I believe that I would have really wanted to have some kind of revenge. Perhaps I still do.”

Harold placed his coffee cup down and shook his head slowly. “Then you have not accepted what happened. You have not grieved for her loss. You still have too much rage about her killing.”

He smiled at me. “Did your grandmother sing this song to you?”

When Harold started singing, I got goose bumps.

Zog nit keyn mol, az du geyst dem letstn veg,

Khotsh himlen blayene farshteln bloye teg.

Kumen vet nokh undzer oysgebenkte sho,

S'vet a poyk ton undzer trot: mir zaynen do!

He paused, opened his eyes and looked at me.

“She didn't, Harold. I don't know what this song is.”

“This song is called
‘Zog Nit Keyn Mol'
—in English, ‘Never Say.' It is written by Hirsh Glick and known as the ‘Partisan Song.' It is a symbol of our resistance during the Holocaust.”

“How do spell the name of the song?”

“Don't write this thing down,
Liebling
. I just wanted you to know this song.”

There was no more coffee to pour, and the day was getting late. My fingers ached from writing.

“So finally the end. The Americans came and we were liberated. They gave us chocolate and good food, which was their kindness, and I believe in response to the horror of how they found us. Many more then died—the rich food was too much for them. Yes, the Americans killed some of us with their kindness.”

I put my pen down and closed the notebook.

*   *   *

Why is it that the most highly stressed, overworked, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen people are generally more likely to die when on holiday relaxing than when at their desk? They work like buggery, sleep too little, eat, drink and smoke too much, yet somehow keep going until the day that they can pull on their beachwear, acknowledge their dire need to relax, and then they promptly die on the lounge chair.

This must be a phenomenon; it must have a name.

I witnessed a similar phenomenon take place in Harold. When he suspected he might be suffering from dementia but there was no official confirmation, he soldiered on and compensated as best he could to keep up a semblance of “normal.” As soon as the diagnosis was made, his condition acknowledged, his descent into dementia was horrifyingly rapid.

Over the final months of my placement I visited Harold as often as I could when I was in the home and struggled once or twice with having to reintroduce myself to a suspicious man. He found nights difficult and became a real problem for the staff to manage—sometimes aggressive and occasionally violent, he often had to be sedated.

One night I decided to do a night shift and realized that Audrey, the kindly Jamaican care worker, needed to change her clumpy shoes. As she walked between rooms checking on the residents as they slept, Harold heard jackboots. A conversation with Dr. Gee resulted in a change of uniform policy and all staff wore rubber-soled shoes. Harold soon slept again, under his bed.

To compound Harold's deterioration, Sarai was fading fast. She refused food, drank little and gradually lost all bodily function, becoming bedbound.

I started smoking. On my final day at the care home, I sat on the terrace with Chris, both of us puffing away.

“Sarai knows Harold is changing.”

I didn't want to tear up in front of my clinical supervisor, so I took a long drag on a Marlboro Red.

Chris, who had turned up early for our final, end-of-placement meeting and had spent some time with Dr. Gee in her office beforehand, dragged on her cigarette companionably and nodded while listening.

“She kept herself functional in order to look after him, I think, but once he moved in and began to deteriorate, she had nothing to save anymore. I think she gave up.”

Chris continued to smoke.

“In fact, Chris, I think she gave up when he did, and then he had nothing else to live for, so he joined her by rapidly declining. Now, I think Sarai is releasing them both. I think she is shutting her body down so that Harold will then be released to die as soon as he can.”

I coughed. “I hate this job, Chris. I've hated this placement. I want to help people live better. I want to relieve them of their mental distress and free them up to a quality of life—a life worth living.”

“Well, good thing you did this placement, because now you know it's not always possible.”

I took another long drag. “Fuck you for saying that, Chris.”

A tense pause.

Shit—now I've failed the placement because I've dissed my supervisor. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

“Oh bloody hell, Chris. I'm really bloody sorry.”

Another pause, another drag.

“No apology necessary,” she said finally. “Your sentiment about this part of the training is noted.”

Noted? Noted how? Noted as in “You've crossed the line, trainee. I am going to fail you”?

Chris stubbed out her filter. “In fact, I agree with you. Fuck this and all the misery it brings to those you work with and to you yourself.”

Then I started to cry.

“You've got to face down the shit and learn from it,” Chris said then. “Don't forget, you've managed a suicidal girl—that was a great job, and well done for someone so young and inexperienced. But…” Chris lit another two cigarettes and handed one to me. “But after the easier ride at the GP practice, I decided to put you here because you needed to learn that you can't save everyone.”

My nose was running.

“Wipe your nose.”

I took the tissue that Chris handed to me.

“You did better here than I expected you would—and I knew that you would do well. Despite the malarkey.”

We both smiled.

Somewhere behind us from deep within the building a series of shrieks ran out. Someone was running from the SS dogs or screaming as a bath was being run.

The early-evening sun was setting.

“Thanks, Chris.”

“I don't want thanks—if you'd been shit, I would have told you.”